Jill Rants and Raves

stella gets her head bumped

The day appears to be ending on an up note. I have decided not to take Stella, one of the 8 week old chihuahua mixes to the emergency vet in order to pay $75 to be told that she needs to rest and to watch out for any worsening of her injury. The injury. Ah, yes. I was getting their food ready, and that in itself is a bloody drama in my household because as I yank the pull can lid off the canned food which I add to their dry kibble, the entire household converges on the kitchen and begins to jostle for position. So I was getting the puppies food ready, and that also poses some problems as Dolly is one of those picky eaters who grabs one kibble and takes it to her room (metaphorically speaking) for half an hour while she chews 150 times as instructed to do in the Holistic Dog magazine she subscribes to, and the others are either not happy with seeing their reflection in the metal shiny bowls, or are freaked out by the white porcelain of the other plates, so you get the idea that mealtime is dreaded by me even though I get entirely neurotic if I think they aren't eating enough kibble and putting on the requisite ounces every week when  they go to get weighed at the vet. On Thursdays. I am nothing if not a protective Jewish butch.

So, I'm grappling with the can and I lose my grip on the remarkably heavy teaspoon I am holding and I watch it freefall through the air towards the pups, lying happily in their dog bed. It was one of those slow motion moments as the inevitable happens and the next thing I know is that Stella starts screaming, running for the door and tripping down the stairs into the garden, howling in pain as a bump starts poking up through that black furrowed brow over the cute little tan eyebrow. The others start howling in sympathy, the mother dog bites my ankle, Riley hides in horror, Allie makes a beeline for the injured pup, Roo starts yelling epithets at me and Target never takes her eye off the kitchen counter and the teetering can of food....it was not one of my best moments in my five weeks of caring for these miraculous survivors of human neglect.

Finally I managed to lift her from the gravel in the yard, she was shaking like a chihuahua on ice, and I felt like a total and complete bastard. This on top of the fact that they had their first vaccine on Thursday, the first invasive assault on their perfect little bodies. But Stella, even with the ugly lump on her head, wagged her tail at me while I hand fed her and then went and bit Vincent in the gut.

After walking my dogs in the park, I came home to find Stella a little lethargic - not surprising, she has a freakin' bump on her head. I called the emergency vet hoping for some 'take two aspirin and call me in the morning' type of advice but of course was told I had to rush there immediately. Which I won't do. I will probably be up every two hours to shake her awake which is what you are supposed to do to people with possible concussion. As it is, I slept on the leather couch in my office last night (there were two many damn dogs on my bed and no I couldn't kick them off), and tonite I may well find myself curled up on the kitchen floor staring at her till daybreak.

But the day is really ending on an up note. I am not telling you any of the nasty death and destruction tales that have tormented me this past week (but tomorrow is another day, another blog), and Susie just called excitedly from her job to tell me she got hit on by a very attractive younger woman.

Berkeley Humane Fire - the result of political expediency.

Last night at midnight a fire broke out at the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society, apparently in the laundry area, but it quickly spread to the area where cats are kept - in cages - and before the alarm was sounded - by a pitbull owned by a tenant in the building and who is today's hero - 12 cats had died. We can only hope they died of smoke inhalation before the flames reached them. Some fast acting by Fire Department staff, shelter volunteers and others saved all the dogs at the facility and some other cats.

There was no adequate alarm system or sprinkler system in the area where the fire broke out.

How ironic that today is the site dedication of the new Berkeley city animal shelter (a completely different facility for the many of you who do not know the difference between Humane Societies, SPCA's and municipal animal shelters). A new animal shelter being built over my strongest objections and over my ten years of fighting for the best in a new facility rather than the 'just get it built' mentality which has driven our elected officials and city staff to move this project forward in spite of huge red flags about public and animal safety at the new site.

But then, I have tilted at windmills as a lifestyle choice for most of my 5 decades....

For 8 years, since I led the bond Measure to victory that raised $7.2 million for a new city shelter I have  urged the city and the Humane Society to build a new joint facility. The Humane owns an entire city block but has no money to upgrade it's crumbling facility, and the City had the money but no site to build on. The City just did not have the desire - led by a Mayor who doesn't give a toss about animals and a City Council that cared far less than it should. The scandal is the failure of the City of Berkeley and the board of the Berkeley East Bay Humane Society to get a deal done when they had an opportunity to do so in 2004 and that is the backdrop to this awful tragedy. Yes, fires can break out in any building, but this facility was a fire waiting to happen, and there were a ton of fingers crossed through the years that nothing terrible happened. And today, as all the dogs from the Humane have been transferred to the equally decrepit current Berkeley Shelter building, one can just hope this isn't the moment when an animal hoarder gets busted and 20 dogs need shelter...

Because for all the talk of emergency plans - the only reason the dogs could even be taken to the animal shelter is because right now the shelter had open kennels - partly because there have been a higher number of euthanasias of dangerous dogs, partly because rescue groups (including the Humane) have taken an increasing number of dogs from the shelter (funny to see some of those 'rescued' dogs come back to the BACS shelter) and because adoption rates have been high. But in the 'new' facility there will be 12 fewer dog kennels than in our current facility. 

The city is so sick of me and so sick of my complaining about this that they will not, even now, take a harder look at what they are doing.

If a fire breaks out at the front of our new building (which by the way is costing $5 million more than budgeted for), the Fire Department will stand hopelessly by without being able to acess the back of the building. When a bad earthquake causes the University overpass to weaken, there will be no way of saving animals as the concrete smashes down on the animal shelter built just feet away, if a couple of homeless people start a fire to keep warm at the back of the building there will be no saving the animals on that side of the building.

Political machinations, backroom deals, the lack of commitment on City Council to building the best and not just the new - and the lack of public process - all of that could be brought to light in the illuminating flames of a small fire and the charred bodies of cats trying desperately to force their way out of locked cages. But the light will be extinguished in the torrent of political expediency as surely as if the torrent were from a Fire Department water cannon.

channeling Voltaire

If one more person says to me 'Jill, the perfect is the enemy of the good' when condemning my pursuit of a 'model' animal shelter I'm going to bust a gut. The thing about Voltaire - who is credited with the original version of that overused and stupid phrase - is that he also wrote that 'man' would be free at the moment he insists upon it - try that on for size if you're currently sitting in the back of a container being sold as a sex slave in Thailand for American and German tourists. Voltaire also noted that 'it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong' (my fave Voltaire quip). And while Voltaire was a writer of the era of 'enlightenment', he was critical of democracy because he saw it as 'propagating the idiocy of the masses'. In other words, take your pick dear reader from the many populist sayings of Mr V. He is the intellectual version of Rumi. Good luck with that.

Personally I think the weak is the enemy of the good. I don't mean weak people, though it is often the weak minded in government who opt for the timid approach in order to achieve consensus which they regard as automatically good. Is this sounding remarkably like the health care debate? Yes, it freakin' is. Obama's obsession with getting a cross party vote on important reforms (whether strategic to prove the point that Republicans will always vote no to progress no matter how many olive branches he extends, or a true reflection of his bi-partisan desires) is leading to the weak solution - not the good.

I'm not saying my pursuit, my passion, my obsession for the 'best' animal shelter we can build is in the same realm as my being able to afford health care again (I was a Kaiser member for 20 years until my monthly premium meant I paid my mortgage or my health care), but the pattern is the same. Of government being unwilling to stop a freight train even when there is a baby carriage on the tracks. Perhaps the baby carriage is empty, they hope. "We've gone too far to stop now." "If we stop now it'll cost us even more later on." Or the classic "Just get the damn thing built" in the words of a former Council member who said in a meeting she was quoting the Mayor.

I am a perfectionist actually. It's a troubling condition which means that I can't go and work in my office unless I have cleared the table in the dining room which inevitably means I have to clean the shelves in my office before I can file the papers on my dining room table, and if I am at the computer in my office all I can think about it the fact that I wasn't able to make my bed because I had put some of the papers to file on my bed in piles, and so was unable to move papers that are on my desk in the office to the table in the dining room because it is already covered with paper. If my computer desk has extra stuff on it, I can't sit down to type.

All that aside - my pursuit of the best animal shelter is not the enemy. Not the enemy of the good, not the enemy of progress, not the enemy full stop. The problem is the expediency and the dissembling half truths that government insists on churning out in order to keep on schedule and get the damn thing built.

"It will be better than what we have" some of these people who sit on City Council crow. That aint a real high bar to cross. And while looking directly at me one council member emitted a sort of snide but entirely false recitation of how many sites had been turned down (by me I think she means) while omitting that her closest ally on Council, the Mayor, had written in an email - that mistakenly got forwarded to me - that he was never going to allow the animal shelter to be built on what would have been the best site because it didn't fit his plan for the Gilman Street corridor - an Auto Row, generating those beautiful revenues from sales taxes to fund his perfect vision of Berkeley. He got his way - no animal shelter. Instead a two acre schoolbus maintenance yard was built which generates no income at all for the city but at least provides the school district employees a great place to eat across the street at Picante.

Berkeley. You gotta love a city that pretends to care. A city that is currently trying to diminish the power of citizens commissions because after all - like Monsieur Voltaire they think most of us are just the idiot masses....

zhu zhu hamsters dodge a bullet

Me and my hamster Fred, 1966. Note the CND button - that's Campaign For Nuclear Disarmament for those of you who think that is just a freakin' peace sign.

Wow, was I happy to be listening to the radio yesterday as the 23 year old head honcho of Zhu Zhu pets explained that their furry, lovable, funny, and talkative little 'pets' were vindicated after a rough week in the media. In spite of being made in China they didn't contain massive amounts of toxic contaminants after all, and were safe to give your under-informed (that's me being polite) children who would probably tire of a real hamster as soon as they got nipped or found those little brown ropes of poops in their bed. After all, as ZhuZhuPets website states: "Zhu Zhu Pets™ hamsters don’t poop, die, or stink"  Yeah, can't have the family pet dying. Or smelling. She did warn however that if you wanna snag one of these 'hot' toys you'd better be prepared to be at your favorite China outlet way ahead of the doors opening because these little faux pets are flying off the shelves. Yippee!!!!

I wasn't sure that I was getting depressed. Now I am. And it isn't just about Zhu Zhu Pets, though that didn't help. The animal shelters are filling up now, as winter sets in, the economy still forcing people to choose between feeding the dog and clothing their children, and small dogs flying out of the shelter doors as adoptions rise but the staff at one shelter saying to me 'most of them will come back after Christmas'.

It isn't even that though. It's Obama and the Peace Prize (bloody hell) it's Obama's lack of commitment to one policy or the other in Afghanistan, it's the virulent hate for Jews expressed on the Letters Page of my local paper, it's the rape and murder of a pregnant woman in a comfortable Los Angeles neighbourhood, it's that with the USPS losing billions of dollars a year, they are closing local post offices (why is the Postal Service losing billions when UPS and Fed Ex seem to be able to make decent money?) and do I want health care insurance reform at this point? No, really, do I? 

It's that I hate this time of year. I love Halloween and I enjoy the weeks till Thanksgiving. And then comes the euphemistic Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving, America looks like the facile, consumer driven, big fat idiot that it tries hard not to look like. And there's no escape. I feel trapped. And the days get shorter and the sky goes grey and I cry a lot, and fear a lot. I still don't seem to have the on/off switch in my brain that I need to stop the wheels from grinding up there the way they do. And now that I am the kinder, gentler Jill this lack of defense makes me feel I need a barricade, not just a few sandbags against the world.

When my family moved to Berlin in the winter of 1961, as the Berlin Wall was beginning it's forced separation of families and cultures and homes and plunged a steel and concrete brace through the heart of a city, my family protected me from the reality - we bought a magnificent tree, so tall the tip folded as it hit the ceiling, we hung large fragile bulbs in exuberant color from the limbs and attached real candles in little metal holders to the branches and the scent of pine was intoxicating, presents tumbled across the floor, the skins of tangerines and the cracked shells of walnuts littered the table, the coal fired central heating roared, as drifts of snow and ice clung to the house. No expense was spared. I was distraught, miserable and lost. But everything looked and felt and tasted so powerfully protective.

I could almost forget that we had left our spaniel Judy, left the puppies and the cats, left the land of wonderment, with the bats at Batu Caves, and the tigers of Fraser Hill and the perpendicular railroad of Penang, and the large sea turtles breeding in the sand on the coast, and the fantasy of a family at peace with itself. We also left behind in Kuala Lumpur the 2 foot high metal Xmas tree that sat on a glass topped table for a while in the sweaty muggy days of a Malayan December.

I really don't like this time of year. I wonder how bio-degradable ZhuZhu pets are because unlike the real thing, they will not return to where they came and feed the soil with their bones and feed the maggots to nurture the earth....

And I really do need to check in with my therapist.

why are these dogs in the same place as me at the same time

It was just a walk in the park. I was loading my gang up in the car when someone called out to me. There's a dog, just cowering in the bushes over there. Two women had left him, with a huge bowl of food, and got in a car and driven away. I walked over with a leash and asked a guy I know as a volunteer at the animal shelter to help. I went and sat next to this quivering beast, frozen to the spot. He snarled as I reached out. Susie, Alan and I surrounded him, and I prodded him gently with a leash to distract him while Alan reached over his neck and tightened a loopy leash around his neck. It was over in a minute and Crunch, as I've inexplicably named him - temporarily - was walking on leash next to Alan towards my car. CoCo, Shuggie and Roo leapt out to greet him, and his eyes lit up, tail swivelled excitedly and soon enough he was jumping in the front seat of my car.

The young 15 pound black Scottie mix that had bared his teeth at me 5 minutes earlier now buried his face under my arm as we drove to the animal shelter to have him scanned for a microchip.

I have to say, its hard for me to understand the idea of leaving your dog in a park with just a bowl of food and walking away. But then, it's hard for me to understand a lot of what people do.

I know that this little dog deserves a good, loving new home - unless there is a damn good reason why an unaltered, unidentified, un-microchipped litle guy is running around loose. So, for now, I'm just showing you Crunch, and if you know anything about why he was cowering in the bushes at the Albany Bulb, or if you know anyone who would love this spectacular guy to bits - lemme know....

the scaremongers

 

Photo: ©Jill Posener, 'Lucy 2007'

Berkeley did the right thing last night when the City Council voted unanimously to enact a ban on declawing cats - unless it is for therapeutic medical reasons to save the cat - in the City of Berkeley. We didn't come away with as strong a statement on 'punishment' as we would have liked. To allay the hysteria whipped up by a strange assortment of bedfellows, the procedure could be charged as an 'infraction' instead of a misdemeanor. It was a tiny victory for the small band of angry pinched face opponents who looked as if they wished it were 1968 again and they were undergrads facing down the forces of oppression on the UC Berkeley campus.

The lone representative from the CVMA (California Veterinary Medical Association which leads the lobbying efforts against declaw bans) looked as if he really is tired of getting dressed in the same rumpled suit every day to give the same tired speech about why vets should continue to be allowed to cut the toes off cats. He also looked a little uncomfortable when one of his allies exhorted Council to beware that we could be restricting the rights of women to safe abortion if we passed a cat declaw ban. With a syrupy voice this fellow Humane Commissioner had most of the audience staring in disbelief as she spoke of 'women over a certain age' remembering what it was like to be denied control of our own bodies.

Another opponent spat out the words 'cat rights' when mixing her metaphors - there is a big difference between animal rights and animal welfare. As a feminist who really did put herself on the battle lines in the 70's for 'A Womans Right To Choose' this cheap, sleazy attempt to taint animal welfare advocates as 'anti-choice' is one of the reasons I will work as hard as it takes to shut them down and shut them up.

Yesterday, in emails circulating around our small northern California city (just over 100,000), people like me were described as 'animal rights fascist extremists' and there was talk of tearing families apart as vets and cat owners were thrown in jail and would never be able to get a job again, that 3 strikes laws could mean a cat declawing could land someone in Pelican Bay.

Here's the thing - cats & dogs - they have no rights. Under California they are called 'property'. If you find an animal and keep it, instead of taking it to a shelter, you have to keep it, just like a lost umbrella, for thirty days before calling it your own. How's that for rights? I'm fine being an owner. I like the responsibility.

It is because they have no rights that we - the human in this equation - must act in their best interest.

It is because they have no rights that we must take the dreadful painful decision of when to end their lives.

It is because they have no rights that we have to protect them against abuse, whether cloaked under cover of veterinary practice or practiced without veterinary care.

I am neither anti abortion nor an animal rights fascist - though being called both in one day is at least a new experience.

Cat declaw bans

West Hollywood, San Francisco, Beverly Hills and now Los Angeles have all voted to support bans on cat declawing except in circumstances where it is medically necessary for the cat's health. Berkeley votes on this issue next Tuesday. This flurry of bans is a direct response to new state law which comes into effect on Jan 1st 2010 which would bar cities from doing just this. This law, SB 762, which was sold to legislators as protecting 'healing arts' practitioners from whimsical city legislators banning certain 'medical' procedures was in fact sponsored by one lobbying business association, the CVMA - the California Veterinary Medical Association. Not by doctors or dentists - although advocacy groups for those practitioners did sign on to the bill - but by the lobbying group concerned with protecting the profit centre of the private veterinary industry.

You'd think this would be a fairly straightforward matter. You can't find a single person who thinks declawing is a good thing to do, vets talk in terms of personal distaste, staff at vet hospitals have taken me aside to ask why, as a Humane Commissioner, I can do nothing about preventing this practice, even the representative of the CVMA who spoke to our Commission spent the better part of his talk saying how awful a procedure it can be, and yet - the battle lines are drawn between allies in animal welfare, between vets who belong to the same business association, and between cat lovers.

Scare tactics have characterized the opposition - that this ban means that cities will soon be banning abortions, that HIV compromised individuals will be killing their cats in droves, that children with cancer will have their beloved pet ripped from their arms, that shelters will be 'flooded' with owner abandoned cats because they can't declaw them. Shame on the fear mongers. Really. Shame on them. Yesterday I heard that someone was calling Council members describing a terrible scenario of people being arrested and hauled off to jail if we pass this ban. 

Is it really analgous to the anti abortion movement? Are the photographs of botched surgeries with gruesome deformed cat paws dripping blood and swollen arms from failed laser surgery the same as the oversize posters of crying fetuses in a metal sink in an abortionists lair? I don't think so. I think that an industry that fails to police itself adequately needs public oversight and that when the vet industry can do no better than to scream that banning this barbaric surgery will mean shelters overloaded with abandoned cats and therefore it will be my fault when thousands die, the conclusion I reach is that they have run out of any meaningful defense.

The answer to most animal related problems lies in education and information yet we are still stuck, in even the most progressive cities, in a state of punitive control after the fact. Animal shelters budgets are huge yet a tiny percentage is assigned to publications, outreach advocates, or low cost and available vaccines, spay/neuter and affordable well-pet care for low income residents. The need to adopt out as many animals as possible to keep euthanasia numbers low means that hardly any counseling is done with a prospective adopter. Education about cat declawing is no exception. Because of it's general purpose name, most people think it means removing the claws. Sounds ok.

It isn't. It involves removing the last bones of the toes of a cat. It is in fact de-toeing. And yes, many people say they are happier with their cat once the cat no longer has intact toes. I live with cats - and I don't play rough with them, I never encouraged them to chase my fingers under the bedcovers, I sprayed them with a water bottle when they scratched at the sofa (even though every single thing failed with the fat beached whale Tutte and she has damaged stuff in my house, declawing was never ever an option) and I don't have cat scratches up and down my arms. Don't like claws? Don't get a cat.

And if you do get a cat - or two - educate them, train them, provide scratching posts, tell your kids not to play games with them where the cat lays on its back and scratches the kids wrists to pieces - with their back legs it should be noted.

One day soon, we won't reconfigure domestic animals to suit our furniture, to conform to a breed standard, or to fit our image of what a designer doggie should look like. And we'll look back and wonder what took us so long to outlaw this obscenity.

skunks and scoundrels

I should know better than to take the dogs for a walk in the park after dark. It was all going reasonably well, watching the fuzzy forms chase through the gloom. Have you noticed dogs always look as if they are running faster at night? But when Target stopped at the fence of the closed off area - where bird watchers in their North Face raingear and Timberland fleece stare longingly through powerful lenses at the $60,000 man-made sand mounds, willing there to be a burrowing owl rather than a junket of crows - that was when I knew we might have a problem. The tail swished slowly, the eyes focused on an unseen (to me) dot in the distance, Aida tried to reassure me that she was ogling a bird. I knew better. That ain't no bird. And I called to my black and white and called again. But she was over or under a fence she had never shown the slightest interest in before and her body was out of my sight in seconds. Pina, the bullheaded chihuahua was right behind her.

I hoped it was a rabbit. Not because I want her to catch any small mammal, but because I knew...just knew that I wasn't in the mood. The mood for the overpowering smell that came into our nostrils seconds later as the black and white dog raced back to the fence, low to the ground, scratching her eyes feverishly, tail and ego tamped down and began rolling in the sodden grasses and dirt as the stinging yellow stream ran down her snout. Ya gotta hand it to skunks. Cars are almost the only predator that doesn't yelp and disappear in the face of a little spray.

Funny how a dog can scale a fence in pursuit of something but becomes a useless lump trying to get back out of the forbidden kingdom. Aida had to climb into the 'habitat' and lift this 45 pound of putrid canine and throw her back over. Pina, amazed by the defiance of an animal no bigger than she was, came back immediately with tales of a huge monster that made itself small and shot steaming oil out of thousand orifices.
When you are a 5 pound midget like Pina, the stories can sometimes get a little fanciful. Target was eager to share the bounty and as I tied her into the back of the car (which I had just freakin' cleaned), I was ready to dump her in the night box at the Shelter. And then as the aroma, no not aroma - the stench, the sickening gagging stench, filled the car another familiar scent reached me 'I've got frickin' shit on my shoes' and by this time hysteria had replaced any remaining sense of calm.

I slammed on the brakes, Aida was gagging out the window and I was screaming into the night air and stamping my feet trying deperately to shake loose the squished splat of dog shit that had affixed to my right sole and slurped up the side. A night riding bicyclist took a wide turn away from the scene which played out under the security lamps of Golden Gate Fields racetrack. By the time we got back to my house, we were both crying from laughing, Aida was still gagging out the window and Target and the others wanted dinner. I feel sorry for the dog actually. A mix of hydrogen peroxide and baking soda took the edge off, but not enough and she had to spend the night in a crate. And she'll do the same for the next week. Everything stinks, it's as if the skunk oil is inside the lining of your nose. Even my coffee this morning seemed less Columbian french pressed and more Nescafe powder.

So that's the skunks. Where's the scoundrels? I have no idea. It seemed like a nice title for a blog.

milo foundation, marin humane and the dirty face of animal welfare

Slim - one of my two Milo cats.

The news that one of California's most popular animal rescue groups has been 'shut down' by another popular animal welfare agency, Marin Humane Society (that happens to have the animal control contract for Marin County and is therefore empowered to oversee other agencies in their jurisdiction) has caused shockwaves around the Bay Area and beyond.

No beating about the bush here. I have known Lynne who runs the Milo Foundation for 10 years, and I've seen Milo at its most extraordinary and I've seen it at its most compromised. I've spent many days at the Sanctuary outside Willits, and have had my heart broken by the situation there but on other days have had my hopes fulfilled by the unlimited generosity of the woman who started out as a breeder of purebred Aussies and after her eyes were opened to the cynicism of the breeding industry (of which she was a part) turned her considerable skills to saving as many of those discarded lives and haunted eyes staring out from a cold concrete kennel as she could. I met the very first dog she had rescued - he was called Trainwreck and he came from the then high kill Berkeley Animal Shelter.

The story of the successes and the failures of Milo are as large as the characters who gravitate to this animal rescue group which broke many molds, which built a 300 acre sanctuary where dogs and cats that had no other chance could go - for life if need be (including some who came from me), but which could not keep up with their own express train form of rescue; Lynne, with her sense of style and design created a 'brand name' as powerful as many better funded organisations and whose zesty lively, exuberant adoption days on 4th Street were like a favorite carnival coming to town. 

Milo was and is the best and sometimes the worst of animal rescue. There's no other way to say it. The biggest heart, the widest arms, the most enthused and energised volunteers, the most determined leadership - never knew when to say 'enough'. And faced with the bottomless pit of need - where animals who were once the new prize possession are discarded like garbage dumped by the side of the freeway - Milo waded into this morass and came out dirty. Rescuing animals from some of the worst, most shameful taxpayer run shelters can be a nasty business. Disease is high in areas where vaccines are a rarity, there is distemper, parvo and virulent forms of flu, there are skin mites and ear mites and ringworm and parasites, and worms and strange clinical conditions, flea allergies that leave kittens anemic and on the verge of death, there are pups which have been stuffed into crates and need surgery for deformed legs. The list of human inflicted abuse and neglect is shocking and baffling. And the level of institutional carelessness and deception is even worse.

But Milo - heroic yet understaffed and underfunded - kept saying 'yes' and on varying occasions over the last few years, lost control of the situation. And Lynne and everyone else at Milo knows that I lost my emotional center two years ago when I watched a litter of six healthy pups get sick while they were in Milo's care and all but two died. They died painful deaths. And when I begged Milo to stop for a while, they did not. And it destroyed a part of me. As Milo moved to San Rafael after having to sell their Berkeley property, I didn't ask 'if' it would happen again, but 'when?'

I believe Milo's greatest mistake was in misunderstanding what people want from an animal rescue group. I truly think that most people want to 'adopt' rather than buy or breed, I believe that people want to be proud that theirs is a 'rescue' dog but they want that dog to be healthy and relatively well behaved. They don't want to see those who are going to die, they don't want to walk through the rivers of piss in shelters that stink of death. They want the 'rescue' to happen before - when Lynne walks through the kennels of pathetic animals and she has to choose who lives. When she leaves, those she leaves behind may be dead within hours.

People want to adopt a little furry companion that has been vaccinated, spayed or neutered, microchipped, treated for parasites, groomed, and the fearful look in their eyes replaced by a grin with a new dental treatment shining off those pearly whites. There's nothing wrong with that.

Milo's decisions to adopt out sometimes wildly unhealthy animals made 'rescuers' out of people who want to support the effort but do not want to go down onto the battlefield.

And don't misunderstand - every group, every one has these problems. It just comes down to numbers.
And the numbers of abandoned animals is rising as the economy takes a toll at the most fundamental levels - people losing jobs, housing, health care, having to choose between putting food on the table for their kids or filling the dogs bowl on the floor. And increasingly, as the cost of veterinary care skyrockets and low cost care is not available, the animals are flooding into the shelters in shocking conditions.

This is a dirty business and Milo has tried as best it can with a heart as big as a canyon to bring joy to people and life to animals whom we selfishly allow to be born and then dump when they become an inconvenience, or sick, or old, or don't match the carpet, or when the baby is born. 

Accusations about Marin Humane closing down a 'competitor' and feeling the effects of Milo's adoption numbers may or may not have validity. But I feel considerable anger towards the Marin Humane Society who closed Milo's adoption center in San Rafael and confiscated 19 animals. What gave Cindy Machado who heads up the MHS, the right to accompany the American Humane Society when they did an investigative tour of the Milo Sanctuary in Mendocino County? What arrogance that MHS showed photographs of staffers treating Milo animals transferred from the San Rafael adoption centre as if they were animals from a puppy mill or fighting dog ring. Marin Humane exploits the suffering of people and animals and this is simply the latest self aggrandising act. Who can forget their photo ops on the tarmac of San Francisco airport as the first Katrina dogs were flown in under the glare of TV lights and dramatic late night arrivals? A gorgeous money raising gimmick, just as the Michael Vick dogs and the latest puppy mill busts form the basis for the next fundraising appeal.

Ultimately it is all about the money. We have a terribly broken system of animal sheltering in California. Anyone remember a searing series of exposes in the San Francisco Chronicle a few years ago when newly elected Assmblyman Mark Leno swore we would see radical and fundamental change in the municipal publicly funded shelters of our state? Our system is riddled with waste, lack of cooperation between agencies, non profits out to stab each other in the back, brutality, excess, top heavy administrations, police run facilities where budgeting is done at the whim of a police chief and not an animal care professional. And where the animals - completely oblivious of the careers they are furthering and the money they are raising - pay the only price that really matters.

Time for change. Milo is flawed. But without their bravery, without the passion of their founder, without the blind selfless devotion of their volunteers, what we would be left with is the climate controlled cooler of the Marin Humane and that would be a shame.

you were famous once

At a party recently, a friend was introducing me to others she knew. One woman looked at me intently. 'Oh, yeah. Yeah. You were famous once' she said. Yeah, that's me, I said. Once famous. Twice shy.

Yesterday I was reading about a show of Irving Penn images, an astonishing collection of photographs taken in the early 50's of tradespeople, small business people, crafts people, individual artisans and blue collar workers; boxers; dance teachers; nurses. The collection, called 'Small Trades' was shot entirely in natural light in front of an unevenly painted back cloth under an open tent which could be erected in any situation. The images are riveting and I felt that familiar longing, an insatiable hunger to be back behind a camera taking photos that matter to me, and the desire to just stand the subject, naked of colour and embellishment in front of a dirty grey backdrop, looking directly at me, bringing just what there is, nothing more.

I never made a good living as a photographer, wasn't working in the commercial or advertising worlds, worked for nothing most of the time, on the promise of payment at some undisclosed time in the future, did favors for emerging authors, had no mentor, sugar mama or philanthropist, spent more on film and processing than the check handed to me with a sly apologetic smile. Even my books, award winning, well-selling photo books, described as brilliant, ground breaking, iconic - left me with fame but no steak.

But I have discovered that if you are going to be broke, you may as well share your life with those who truly appreciate you and whose understanding of fame is approximately zero. Dogs.

And now that I feel that desperate yearning to 'produce' once more, I also know that I am so troubled by what I see, what I know, what I feel about what happens in our animal shelters that I can't focus my lens on anything else. There are nights when I wake sweating, fretting about the years wasted, the time spent on everything but that which made me famous. Have I given up on my life apart from this passion?

When I sleep I dream of a space with a concrete floor and light flooding in and a bed with white sheets in the middle of the room, one leather couch (which I traded for a long time ago) a kitchen and bathroom and a place to photograph taking up the space. A light filled space overlooking a meadow, and coffee in the morning and a birch tree swaying. And my cats and dogs around, peeing outside, meandering along the gravel paths, leaning on a door frame, stretched on a rug, watching something they see in their minds eye.

And then my mind is filled with what I saw yesterday. Kennel upon kennel of dogs going nowhere, sitting in their own feces, the kennels divided into two to double up intake space, kittens waiting for death in plastic vari-kennels in the corridors, a 3 pound chihuahua shivering in terror huddled in the corner in a metal cage, he had pissed in his water dish and the towel he sat on was soaked, and he snapped at my hand as I moved towards him. The 9 month old Great Dane pup was 80 pounds of emaciated skin and bone, too afraid to move forward in her cage, the pitbulls one next to the other next to the other like a line up of the usual suspects, the stench of shit and piss, a cat lying dead in a humane trap sitting on a table, and the 'surgery' room filled with animals readied for euthanasia. The kennel attendant with tired eyes and wearied by his task muttered as he led us through the chaos 'disposable, they're just disposable, cats and dogs, in our society', as he contemplated his endless task of swimming against a tide, a flood of animals discarded. 

I sometimes wonder if it all was about getting to this point, where ego and pride have no place. Where I am only really happy when the days involve making a difference in just one life, a life that will not turn to me and tell me that I was famous once. But I still have that longing to look through the lens and see the picture I want to take. Are these two things so at odds with one another that I will never resolve this?

© photos by Jill Posener. Do me a favor - enjoy 'em, don't steal them. ta!